June 23, 2010 - In the current issue of Military & Aerospace Electronics magazine, VPT’s team provides technical information and market insight for John McHale’s article ”Radiation-Hardened Electronics Technology Remains Stable Amid Steady Demand in the Space Market.”

Excerpt:
“The hottest market shift is a huge demand for rad-hard point-of-load converters that can be used in conjunction with traditional isolated rad-hard DC-DC converters to support high efficiency distributed architectures,” says Daniel Sable, President, of VPT Inc. “Using point-of-load converters instead of standard DC-DC converters throughout a system saves size, weight, and dramatically improves efficiency and therefore thermal designs are simplified. All of these are critical issues for spacecraft. This technology is very mature for commercial applications, but there have been few offerings of high efficiency, non-isolated, rad-hard point-of-load DC-DC converters for use in space applications.”

“A major industry concern the past few years has been enhanced low dose rate sensitivity (ELDRS),” says Leonard Leslie,” Manager of Space Programs at VPT. Designs must not show ELDRS, which is caused by components degrading earlier when exposed to a dose rate closer to that seen in the application, as opposed to the high dose rates traditionally used for design qualification,” he adds.